Linux at Tempe Camera; Running Linux from CD - no hard drive.

[der.hans]

Am 27. Mar, 2002 schwätzte Christopher Bardin so:

> No, Tempe Camera is not using Linux for anything that I
> know of, yet.  I should mention that I don't have anything

Oh well. Would be cool :).

> to do with the various computers at work; I'm interested in
> Linux for my own use at home.  My first computer came with
> Windows Me installed.  I didn't care but my experience
> since then leads me to dislike and distrust Microsoft and
> its products.  When I looked into the alternatives to
> Windows the best choice seemed to be Linux.
> I subscribed to the PLUG development list because I was
> trying to get (Slackware version 7) Linux to run on a

The PLUG-discuss list would actually be better. There is more traffic (
not too bad ), but that means you'll generally also get more answers to
non-devel questions. There's also ASULUG, http://ASULUG.asu.edu/, if you're
involved with the Uni.

> barebones computer, just in RAM before I installed the hard
> drive.  That seemed like a sporting way to learn about my
> computer and about Linux.  After all, isn't that how PCs
> were done before hard drives became cheap?

As far as I know PCs have always depended on some sort of drive space. It
was floppies back in the early 80s, but it's been hard drives since then.

Recently there have been some inroads to running a full-fledged Linux system
from CD. I can give you a copy of a CD from SuSE. There's also
www.DemoLinux.org. The SuSE CD still requires a couple of hundred MB of disk
space for saving changes.

There are a variety of Linux systems that run from floppy only. They are all
for specific purposes, e.g. rescue systems, firewalls, security audits...

> I assumed that Linux was modular and that running it on a
> minimal computer (CPU, RAM, some way to load the OS into
> RAM, keyboard and display) would be straightforward.

Nope. That's actually pretty hard to do. While Linux can run on very little
resources you don't get much in terms of applications at that point.

> Apparently the Linux core was designed with the assumption
> that a hard drive, or some sort of communication with a
> hard drive such as a network connection, would always be
> part of any computer it would be used on.

The distributions make those presumptions. For most non-embedded work I
think they're good presumptions. Maybe not presuming there's a network
connection, but I personally don't work without a Net :).

ciao,

der.hans
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